Human society can be regarded as an ecological system, or "ecosystem," something like a great pond, filled not with fish and frogs, plants and bacteria, but with workers and employers, gas stations and power companies, counties, states, and nations, churches and lodges, automobiles and refrigerators, wheat and steel and uranium, and all the innumerable "species" of social life, organizations, households, businesses and commodities of all kinds.... These populations of social species act and interact on each other in a great variety of ways. Some are mutually competitive„the more television sets, the fewer movie houses, both competing for "nutrition" in the form of the consumers' dollar. Some are mutually cooperative or complementary, like automobiles and gas stations. Some have parasitic relationshipsthe more cops, the fewer robbers, but the more robbers, the more cops!

Kenneth Boulding, Principles of Economic Policy, p.15

When I was still an undergraduate at San Francisco State I
developed an interest in the structure of animal communities. Both Comte
and Durkheim suggested that the study of such communities could be
useful for the development of Sociology, and I took the suggestion
seriously. After all, we and other social animals must share some
organizing principles in common, whatever we believe may in addition
distinguish us from them.

Back then I read Schaller's account[1] of the
mountain gorilla and Wheeler's much earlier one on ants[2] and on social insects in general.[3] I related Sociology's "human ecology", as
developed by Park[4], Quinn[5] and Hawley[6], to Allee's [7] animal ecology and Odum's [8] general ecology. Among other things, I
noted in all this a simple pattern in human behavior which paralleled
one observed in many animal groups, a simple pattern I have come to call
the "law of equidistant spacing".

The bus I rode from San Francisco State to my apartment in Haight-
Ashbury arrived empty at the pick-up point, having discharged all its
outbound passengers at the Stonestown Shopping Center a block away. If I boarded while the bus was still nearly
empty, I could rush to the back seat and, from there, observe new arrivals as they chose
their seats. These people appeared to be exercising "free will"  they looked around
before sitting down, sometimes uncertainly, sometimes walking past a seat
then returning to it. Even so, I could predict the seat they would
"choose" while they were still up front paying their fare, before they even
looked into the seating area. People (or pairs of them) tend to select
seats equally distant from others already occupied. My "equidistant" predictions were
correct perhaps 85-90% of the time. You can test this law with a counter
example  try sitting immediately next to someone you don't know on a
nearly empty bus!

I still use my law of equidistant spacing, which you can observe in
birds sitting along a roof or telephone wire or among amoebas grazing
on a bacterial field (see below), in introductory courses to
suggest that "free will" need not be incompatible with sociological
laws. All that is needed is an absence of conscious interaction (in the
bus case people who don't know each other) or the presence of very large
numbers so that local thought/will, behavior and interactions have minimal effect on the aggregate pattern.

I supplement it with more immediate examples. When the sun comes out in
Bellingham WA, students spread out on the lawn below my fifth floor
office window like lizards sunning themselves on the rocks[9]. Should several of them leave for class,
I can predict where their successors will "choose" to lie by invoking
my law of equidistant spacing. I have noticed that seating in restaurants can be
problematic because of the same law: asking to share a table in the
smoking section of the University coffeeshop, when there may be empty
tables immediately nearby in the non-smoking section, constitutes a form
of "invasion", making both the asker and the sitter uncomfortable.

In trying to find out how far down(?) the evolutionary ladder I could
find social life, I came across Bonner's work[10] on the "slime mold amoeba". I found
these creatures fascinating, as do apparently many biologists: [11]

The remarkable life cycle of the slime mold
Dictyostelium, the best-known member of the Acrasiales, is of
general interest to biologists because it provides a model system of a
developing multicellular organism that can be experimentally manipulated
with relative ease. For sociobiologists it has the more special
attraction of displaying perhaps the most advanced social behavior of
single-celled organisms  the aggregation of the myxamebas that
initiates the multicellular half of the life cycle.

As single cells they behave like true amoebæ, grazing
(equidistantly) on bacteria fields and dividing frequently (A). When
food runs out for a given amoeba (say the blue spot in B), it becomes the focal
point for mass migrations of others. The
resulting cluster forms a sausage-like slug, as big as 2 millimeters in
length (E). "It" behaves like a multicellular organism, with distinct
head end, moving slowly toward heat and light.[12] One or two weeks later "it" turns
upright (F) forming a fruiting body, with some of the former
amoebæ forming a base and stalk (H), others forming spore-bearing
spheres (I) at the top. The spores subsequently spray outward (J),
emerging later as single cells, and the cycle repeats.

In graduate school I tried to submit a 50-60 page paper on animal
communities as part of the assignment for a seminar entitled "Social Structure
and Process". It was rejected outright: the topic could be of no interest
to sociologists. I nevertheless remained intrigued by what faculty
referred to as sub-human social structures, particularly in seminars on
the history of social thought. So much early social philosophy and 19th
century sociological theory was taken up with the analogy between
society and the organism, but I found it extremely useful to suggest a
slightly different one, between society and an ecosystem. In another
arena, teaching intro sociology courses, I enjoyed telling well-scrubbed
fraternity and sorority types in my classes about the ecological system we carry
around on and in our bodies.[13]

I continued my interest in animal societies after arriving at Western,
publishing two articles which suggested that the ecological system might
serve as a paradigm for the quantitative analysis of human society.[14] Central to each was the notion of a set
of interacting populations, as illustrated with the nine species in Fig.
11-2. Here, species X1 is dependent upon
species X7 which, in turn is dependent on
species X9, and so on. "Dependent on" usually
means a predator-prey relation, but it could also refer to parasite-
host, symbiotic or commensalistic relations.

This general interdependence can be described by the set of simultaneous
equations, the ecosystem:

(1)

where the k equations with k unknowns presumably have a stable solution
at dXi/dt = 0 for i = 1,2,...,k. Real
ecosystems would show fluctuation around the Xi
equilibrium values, and there are also, of course, exogenous
factors not represented here.

I don't mean to suggest that Sociology should attempt to find the exact
form of such functions as Eqs. 1, or that it should only concern itself
with the relation between human and non-human species. What I am
suggesting is that we might benefit from thinking of society itself as a
set of interacting populations. Consider a university as a small
society: so many students producing so many student credit hours which
generate so many faculty positions; so many dorm rooms, class rooms,
recreation facilities, parking places, etc. It seems a useful way to
think of "social structure".

Almost from the beginning of my interest in non-human social structure,
the most influential work I came across was Wynne-Edwards' Animal
Dispersion in Relation to Social Behavior.[15] One of the primary thrusts of this work
is to argue that much social behavior previously thought to be connected
with mating (a Freudian influence?) was in fact connected with
regulating demographic pressure on the food supply (a Marxian/Malthusian
influence?).

Dawn-and-dusk bird song, for example, occurs even at times when mating
is not taking place; its purpose, rather than broadcasting appeal to
potential mates, appears rather to be to serve as a census of bird
density, an indication to others whether to land or continue flying to
other feeding sites. The hierarchy ("pecking order") has a similar
demographic function: it identifies the surplus individuals who must
leave should the food supply become too low to support the existing
group. The "willing" exit of the surplus prevents a "war of each against
all" which could wipe out the group. The traditionally claimed libidinal
and power motives behind animal behavior prove far less important to
group survival than does regulation of population-density vis-a-vis the
food-density, says Wynne-Edwards. [16]

Fig. 11-3 is an adaptation of a map on the second page of Wynne-Edwards'
book. It is based on Danish oceanographic expeditions made in search of
the birthplace of freshwater eels, between 1913 and 1928. Standard hauls
of macroplankton were taken all over the North Atlantic to be used as a
broad index of the richness of surface waters, in terms of food for
pelagic birds. The data are shown for 10deg. quadrants, upper figures
showing the average volume of macroplankton in cc in a standard haul,
and lower figures (bold face) the average number of birds recorded per
day. He concludes:[17]

In spite of the collective character of the data and the
differences in season at which the different areas were sampled, the
correlation that emerges between bird density and abundance of plankton
is very strong: in numerical terms it can be expressed by a coefficient
of +0.85. The probability that such a situation could have arisen by
chance alone is negligible (P << 0.001).... The population-density
in fact appears to be graded so that in every area it bears about the
same constant average relation to the amount of plankton
present.

With N birds and P plankton, and computed[18] quadrant areas A, the 21 cases with N and
P given produced Eq. 7 with r2 = .77;
p{β=2/3} = .113. The finding "fails to reject"
(supports) Eq. 10-11, the density of one species being related to the
other with the 2/3 slope.

I don't think this is mere coincidence. The components of the initial
Eq. 10-6 need not be restricted to governments. The sea birds
represented here have a "maintenance cost" and an "interaction cost",
just as county seats do. Animals are subject to time minimization
constraints: so many calories burned per day requires so much food per
day. Anything which minimizes the time it takes a predator to find prey
(better eyesight, faster flight), improves its survival probability. The
prey may also increase the predator's search time (interaction time),
through camouflage, burrowing, or other defenses.

Brain-Body Ratios

I found another possible application of time-minimization to biological
phenomena in an article[19] dealing with
brain size and maternal basal metabolic rates. The equation which got my
attention was

(2)

where E is brain weight and P is body weight. In connection with this,
the author states

However, previous analyses of brain size allometry in the major
vertebrate groups have been limited by small sample sizes and/or
inadequate testing of the value for the allometric exponent. Re-analysis
of brain size allometry in placental mammals, taking a representative
sample of 309 species from 13 orders, yields the following allometric
formula

(r = 0.96; 95% confidence limits for [the slope] = 0.73-0.78). Hence, for
placental mammals there is no empirical justification for the widely
accepted value of 0.67 for the allometric exponent. The value of 0.76
[was] confirmed by at least two independent analyses of large samples of
mammal species.

This means

(3)

The equations and derivations we have dealt with so far have all applied
to a two-dimensional, flat, areal world. If we begin as before with

(*10-6)

we must define distance as the cube-root rather than the square-
root (organisms, being three dimensional, distances within them should
be proportional to the cube-root of their volume, V). We have N
brain cells interacting with P body cells under the constraint of time
minimization:

(4)

The concluding equation, parallel with Eq. 10-15, becomes

(5)

Again, this need not be thought of solely as coincidence or empty
analogy. Brain cells must interact with other cells throughout the
volume of the body. Presumably it is in the interest of the organism (or
the population which produced it) to minimize the time it takes for such
interaction.

Is this good biology? I'm not qualified to say. I present these studies
because they fall within the framework of the sociological studies in
earlier chapters and might perhaps suggest further avenues of work. As I
mentioned above, there ought to be some connection between
Biology and Sociology. Just what that connection is remains to be
seen.

[11] This quote and the brief description of the life
cycle of the slime-mold is from Edward O. Wilson, Sociobiology: the
New Synthesis, 387-92, Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1975.
Fig. 11-1 is my simplified rendition of Wilson's description.

[12] Now there, I submit, is a "structural
functionalism" beyond the dreams of Talcott Parsons.

[16] This, incidentally, reinforces the view
propounded by Wheeler, Op. Cit., regarding the "nutrient basis"
of ant social structure. The ant nursemaid is driven to carrying for her
pupæic charges, he argued, not by an altruistic concern for the
young but by the possibility that she might find a dead one to eat. Ant
society is possible, he says, because permanently half-starved ants
receive their sustenance only through contributing to the maintenance of
the group.